Saturday, January 27, 2007

You may remember me raving last summer about how much I liked having the MLB Extra Innings package. I loved watching all those out of market games, especially once the Red Sox fell out of the race in late August and September. I got to watch a lot of the Astros near comeback in the NL Central and a fair amount of the exiting young players on the Florida Marlins, among many other games I would not have otherwise seen.

Now Major League Baseball, in it's eternal search for the short-term buck at the expense of it's most loyal fans, is reported to be making a deal with DirecTV to be the sole outlet for Extra Innings. Of course, I have cable via Comcast, not satellite TV.

This essentially leaves me with two choices: replace my cable with DirecTV or give up Extra Innings. If it comes down to it, I'm going to skip Extra Innings. I'm reasonably happy with my cable, and I'm just not interested in dealing with switching over. There are plenty of games on ESPN, Fox and TBS that I can watch in addition to Sox games on NESN. I'm not willing to watch games on my computer on MLB.TV, either.

MLB is reported to have gotten $700 million for seven years from DirecTV for the exclusive rights for the Extra Innings package. According to the information that's out there, the $700 million represents an increase of approximately $1 million per team, per season over the offer made by the group that currently provides Extra Innings to multiple cable and satellite outlets. Basically, MLB made the decision to screw its fans for the cost of one bad middle reliever.